


a sudden throw

by hollowforest



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Depersonalization, Dissociation, Drabble, M/M, Second Person, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 17:40:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1613669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollowforest/pseuds/hollowforest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Second person drabble from Bucky's POV at the end of TWS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a sudden throw

Whether you open your eyes or close them, there's one thing you always remember:

You're cold.

Inside of you are the edges of a bleak, white waste. An endless tundra, stretching from the soles of your feet to the top of your skull. It crystallizes your insides and sharpens your synapses until you crackle with every step. Every waking thought is edged with that chill, because there is either searing whiteness or the black oblivion while you sleep.

Or perhaps you die. You can't remember.

And with a body like this--with a mind like this--there's no telling whether you're really alive or not. Consciousness isn't a kindness. Consciousness comes with orders, and after orders comes the blackness. A different kind of erasure than this constant cold, but familiar. Almost comforting, but you're no longer sure you understand the meaning of that word.

How would you? Suspended like this, between one void and the next, time stretches out until it no longer exists. You aren't governed by the same laws as the people around you. Those people, who are alive, and then they are not.

The people you kill are made of something soft and warm. They die, and you know they die. But when you watch them collapse, you wonder sometimes--

Is that still a possibility for you?

Can you die?

Or will you just wake up on a different table, for different orders?

One of these thoughts puts you at ease. The other makes you, as they call it, "unstable." Afterwards, erasure always comes. Bright and sparkling, a whiteness that plunges you into nothing. You rarely have any memory of what came before. Only cold, and a table, and ice water, pumping sluggishly through your veins as you struggle to discern what's real, and what isn't.

By now, things you associate with "warm" barely register. Sunlight. Other people. The brief flash of memory when you meet someone with the right kind of blue eyes. Or hear a certain laugh. An odd handful of words, stringing themselves together, forming a crazy map in your brain. You get close, but never close enough to remember before erasure comes.

Just before you're overtaken by that sparking whiteness, you remember. And then you're plunged back into black ice again.

Sometimes, when you wake, you think you remember something. The orders come swiftly, filling your mind, taking your focus. That's the way it had always been, and as far as you can tell, the way things will always be.

Like that, you never would have remembered.

But something warm found you.

Fought you.

Struggled with you.

Pleaded and begged, called you a word you couldn't quite find the meaning for:

'Friend.'

This familiar blue-eyed stranger fit a hole in your head. A gap in the wall, something the ice grew around, made sharper, sharp enough to maybe even hurt. To touch. And he did something targets weren't supposed to do.

He stopped fighting. He didn't want to fight you. He called you friend again, asked you to remember. His words did something to you, chipped at you, found that gap and split it open, until all that ice threatened to crack.

Because he said he would be with you until the end of the line.

Why was that so familiar?

And why did that carve so deeply--to have someone to share an ending with? Someone who knew what the end was, who, maybe, could help you find it. An exit from your suspended existence, trapped outside of time, between two oblivions. No endings.

That's why you can't lose him yet.

You drag him out, wishing you knew who he was to you. Those eyes are closed now, but you know their exact color; you remember it. You haven't remembered anything but orders for such a long time, but staring down at him, you're starting to believe maybe you could.

Maybe this is a start. Ships crashing overhead; a world disintegrating. But you, and him--here is a start. Maybe an end. Unconscious in the grass, but alive. His face is so familiar it taunts you, and you can feel the shifting coming on, the shift that always precedes erasure.

There's no one around to take orders from, though. Those ships have crashed. They're crumbling with the glaciers in your mind. Nowhere to go. No one to answer to. A different wave is coming, this time. And afterwards, maybe the only person you'll wake up to is yourself.

No tables.

No whiteness.

You turn away, wondering what to call yourself now. You never had a name--not really. Just 'the Winter Soldier.' Cold words, like you always were--freezing to the point of numbness and forgetting.

But now you're a different sort of cold.

And you're no longer sure that name fits.


End file.
